NAAM Day 27 :Oh No! Am I Writing Adoption Poetry?

Bastardette, Miss Carolyn, Miss Hendryx, Dr. Cleo. Texas Bards Poetry Reading, Texas State Museum of Asian Cultures & Education, November 16, 2024

A week ago last Saturday (November 16, 2024,) I did a poetry reading at the Texas State Museum of Asian Cultures & Education in Corpus Christi sponsored by the Texas Bards I hadn’t done a poetry reading in at least 20 and I was a little nervous, but it went fine.

Back before adoption ate my brain I was a pretty well-known poet in central Ohio. I did a lot of readings, both featured and open mic at the Poetry Forum at Larry’s, The Columbus Cultural Arts Center., Poetry in the Park, Doo-Wac Hair Salon, the Short North Tavern, and the King Avenue Coffee House. I even did a few radio poetry readings in Columbus and Oberlin. Each year I read at the 4-day Columbus Arts Festival and one year, I organized the reading.

I got published in various journals, whose names I forget. (More about that in a minute), won a bunch of contests for Ohio Poetry Day, and other competitions, I even had a piece in the feminist anthology, I Call My Name Daugher and It is Good, used in Women’s Studies classes in the 1990s. It is the only poem I ever wrote about being adopted.

For a while Elizabeth Ann James and I wrote a monthly poetry column for the Columbus Free Press. We were booted when a new publisher came on who decided that poetry was stupid (or something) and he wanted to fill the paper up with DSA shit. He didn’t last long.

Cows in Flight. Elizabeth, Fred, Mike. Bastardette (sitting). King Avenue Coffee House, Columbus, Ohio (date unknown. Phono: Allen Zak

I started the poetry band, Cows in Flight with Elizabeth Ann James, Fred Andrle, and MIke Dittmer. We did a midnight poetry performance at the Clintonville White Castle and got national press coverage. When I told my mom about it, she said I embarrassed her (I did that a lot–especially in public–something about my hair or clothes.) OK. She was a bit sensitive about things. Private. She told me that if I ever wrote a poem about her she’d change her will–and she was serious. It was really weird.

But what did I write about?

I am not an MFA poet. I wrote about serial killers, movie stars and movies, boyfriends, outlaws, criminals, war, sex and drugs and rock n roll. One of my fans called me a “Rock n Roll Puss in Boots Not sure why, but it was cool.

Then something happened. I stopped writing. This coincided with the Birth of Bastard Nation. I simply lost interest and had nothing to say. When I tried to say something, nothing came out, so I gave up except for a handful of pieces that usually weren’t very good. I’d lost my voice and I’ve missed it.

Then in 2022, my Big Love Soier died. in Russia. We were together for nearly 32 years–as much together as one can be 2000 miles apart and unseen for 20 years. My voice came back, and the words spilled out. I thought what I was writing was good, and looked around for places to send it, but nothing sounded right. Descriptions of what journals were looking for made no sense: push/break boundaries, challenge perceptions, makes you feel. (Feel what?

Then I saw a notice on Facebook from the Texas Bards, a state-wide poetry organization looking for submissions for this year’s anthology. I submitted 3 and 1 was accepted. Now this isn’t some zine. It’s a high-quality journal, and it was exciting to know that I still had it, and somebody else thought I did, too.

And what made this special is that it was new stuff. It had to be new because when I moved to Texas more than 200 poems along with the diskette, and hard copy journals I’d published in, were accidentally left in storage with no reasonable way to retrieve them. Back when I wrote and published these pieces it was much more difficult to find a market on the ‘net much less publish there than it is today. I have only been able to retrieve one poem because it was published online.

Now, to the point of this rambling.

Getting my voice back and reading at the event has caused the words to come tumbling out. Since November 16 I’ve written 8 new poems. Four are good to go, 3 need a tiny bit of work, and 1 isn’t so great yet. Stuff just comes to me. My sleep disorder is worse because I have to get up and write down what’s in my head. I’d much rather work on poetry than write for damn NAAM 2024 every day–which does eat my brain.

So, in my new poetry I’m seeing stuff that shouts adoption at me. If you are adopted and write poetry, you know this might not be a good sign. Adoption poetry can be really bad. Writing can be therapeutic, which is great, but it’s not always good, or even mediocre.

So here’s the catch. I am going over my new stuff and suddenly I see a pattern that screams adoptee dysfunction. Every damn poem written since Soier died carries the theme of disengagement: disembodiment: memory, forgetfulness, remembrance, history, identity, the loss of identity; identity switches, twinning. It’s shocking, but at least it’s not nostalgic. Exactly.

Now I wonder if my old stuff in storage carries the same adoptee curse. Certainly not all of it, but enough. I can’t post any of the new poetry here, since a lot of the places I want to submit to require that tthe poems not be published anywhere else, including blogs. Here, though,are a few lines from my latest Soier piece: I may remove the “niche line, but it is nihe history Soier was legendary in St. Petersburg. at a certain time in history. (WordPress insists on putting spaces between the lines)

You suffered no consedquences

And I observed

and reorded

and archived

you into history

or a nihe of history

When your time ran out

I became your memory.

See what I mean?

This doesn’t bother me much. It’s fun to find. I’m just surprised that I’d not noticed the pattern earlier. I’m don’t view myself as particularly self-aware or reflective, but maybe I am.

And btw, don’t let adoption eat your brain.

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